The Grand Unified Theory of Documentation (AKA: Your project needs all 4 types or you have bad documentation)
The Grand Unified Theory of Documentation (AKA: Your project needs all 4 types or you have bad documentation)
documentation.divio.com
Documentation System
The mistake most devs make when trying to document their project is that they only make one (maybe two) types of documentation based on a readme template and/or what their mental model of a newcomer needs.
Devs need to be actively taught that:
- Good documentation isn't one thing, it's four. To have good documentation, you need all four distinct types of documentation.
- What the four types of documentation are (this is discussed in the link)
If you don't have all four types of documentation, you have bad documentation.
Tutorials
Tutorials are lessons that take the reader by the hand through a series of steps to complete a project of some kind. They are what your project needs in order to show a beginner that they can achieve something with it.
They are wholly learning-oriented, and specifically, they are oriented towards learning how rather than learning that.
How-to guides
How-to guides take the reader through the steps required to solve a real-world problem.
They are recipes, directions to achieve a specific end - for example: how to create a web form; how to plot a three-dimensional data-set; how to enable LDAP authentication.
They are wholly goal-oriented.
Reference guides
Reference guides are technical descriptions of the machinery and how to operate it.
Reference guides have one job only: to describe. They are code-determined, because ultimately that’s what they describe: key classes, functions, APIs, and so they should list things like functions, fields, attributes and methods, and set out how to use them.
Reference material is information-oriented.
Explanation
Explanation, or discussions, clarify and illuminate a particular topic. They broaden the documentation’s coverage of a topic.
They are understanding-oriented.
I've had that article saved for years, it's still the best way to break down documentation imo. Another key point for code documentation is that the closer it is to the code it's describing, the more likely it is to be read and maintained.
What does this mean?
The issue I see a lot in the JS ecosystem is laying out documentation like a reference guide, but then not including all parameters or functions. These types of documentation are very helpful if what you need to know is included, because they have nice friendly explanations and examples. But eventually you will run into a parameter that is mentioned on Stack Overflow, or is in a code snippet in the documentation, but then has no further explanation in the documentation, as if it doesn't exist.
Projects where the README is the only documentation seem to suffer from this problem the most. They give examples of the most common parameters and functions, and then that's it.
In JS this is a big issue because there may be no way to know a parameter even exists, or what values it accepts, unless it is documented.
A lot of documentation in the Java ecosystem has huge auto-generated monstrosities with absolutely no explanations. In Java this is usually not useful because that information can be found in the types. But in JS it would be incredibly useful. Unfortunately it isn't as easy to automatically generate that type of documentation for JS.
Python in my experience has the best of both worlds. It has the friendly explanations and examples. But also has all of the parameters, even if explanations for some are a bit less detailed. And all of that is combined into a single place.
The good thing about the JS ecosystem is that almost everything in the last few years is written in typescript.
Just by typing in the name of the function and opening the first parenthesis, you're getting type information right there.
For example, typing:
globalTestSetup(Presents a modal showing:
globalTestSetup(options: { page: Page, slow?: boolean, locale?: string } );